Earning credibility and building strong partnerships with business leaders are critical to shifting an organisation’s thinking about HR and improving the strength of the HR team’s ability to influence, writes Karen Gately
To what extent do you and your team influence the priorities set, decisions made and actions taken by leaders in pursuit of your organisations vision and strategic objectives? Are you satisfied with the impact you are able to have on the way your organisation goes about leveraging the talent and energy of your work force? Many of the HR leaders I meet express frustration with the approaches taken despite their best efforts to influence. Many have a strong desire to make a far more significant contribution to the standard of results their organising is achieving.
While ultimately it is the CEO or business owner who must mandate the role HR gets to play, a skilled and influential HR leader can shift an organisation’s thinking and improve the strength of their team’s ability to influence. Among the most important ways to strengthen your team’s position are to earn credibility and build strong partnerships with business leaders.
Earn credibility – reflected in trust and respect
Reflect on the quality of relationships between your team and people managers at all levels of your organisation. How successful do you believe these relationships are? At the heart of success is the trust and respect that is shared. By definition it’s impossible to act as a trusted adviser if people don’t trust you, and it’s difficult to effectively coach or persuade people to adopt a particular point of view if they don’t respect you and the value you are able to add. Unless HR is able to build and maintain trust the team’s value to the organisation is seriously compromised.
- Know the business. In building credibility, it is essential that every member of the HR team understands the vision and strategic objectives of the organisation and is able to articulate them. To do that HR professionals need a well-developed understanding of the organisation’s products, services and operational processes. Just as important is awareness of the competitive landscape in which the business operates and the implications for HR strategies and priorities.
- Be commercial. To earn credibility HR is wise to focus on achieving business goals and take a pragmatic approach to setting HR priorities and advising managers. A common mistake made is focusing on HRs agenda without a clear line of site to the commercial outcomes they are intended to influence. Using ‘best practice’ as a reason for doing what you are is typically not enough to pass the commerciality test with senior business leaders.
- Talk business language. Like any profession, HR is full of jargon that many business leaders don’t understand. Earning the buy in of leaders requires that they fully appreciate how and why the recommendations you put forward will make a difference to the outcome they are striving to achieve. The language you and members of your team use will have a profound impact on your client’s clarity, confidence and ultimately engagement in the strategies you are working to drive.
- Link HR performance to business outcomes. HR effectiveness is not just about how well HR teams perform but also reflected in how well the business performs. When HR teams are leveraged effectively the benefit to business performance is very real and clearly evident. Sustainability, profitability, productivity, innovation, growth, business process maturity and quality are all business indicators of a successful approach to getting the best from people at work. Demonstrate with hard evidence how your team influences business performance.
Build partnerships
Fundamentally the role of HR is to work in partnership with leaders to build and leverage the human capabilities and spirit needed to achieve optimal results. Success of any partnership is reflected in the way each party chooses to behave. People managers who value HR and leverage their relationship typically believe HR is a valuable resource and their ally. They proactively seek out advice from HR, include HR staff on project teams and make decisions influenced by the advice of their HR colleagues.
- Align HR and business plans. If the purpose of HR is to optimise team performance, and in turn business results, the HR plan should clearly reflect the business’s agenda. Engaging business leaders in the HR planning process is essential. It’s extraordinary to me how often HR plans are developed in a vacuum, disconnected from the organisation’s strategic objectives and priorities. One senior HR executive once told me he didn’t need the input of business leaders in their HR planning process because ‘we are the experts in people management and should set the agenda for our department’. HR cannot enable business performance without working closely with leaders to determine priorities and the approach needed to enable success.
- Support leaders to execute well. While strategy is essential, success is ultimately determined by successful execution. A common mistake I observe is focusing on the development of programs with insufficient energy invested in ensuring their success. For example culture, change or engagement programs have the potential to add enormous value if implemented well. At times however success is measured by a program’s existence rather than in the realisation of benefits and tangible returns on the organisation’s investment. While expecting compliance with programs is important, so too is coaching and guiding managers to effectively leverage or apply them.
- Be prepared to challenge and educate. Help leaders to see when the approaches they are taking are not successful. Have the tough conversations needed to build awareness and shift the thoughts and actions of leaders who need to improve their approach. Recognise the potential adverse consequences of proposed actions and take pre-emptive steps to mitigate these by influencing awareness. Invest in developing the technical and people management capabilities needed across your organisation to influence the quality of decisions they make.
- Share ownership of the outcome. For HR to be the valuable asset it has the potential to be, HR and people managers need to share accountability for success. It isn’t good enough for HR to make vague claims of making a difference others can’t see, just as it isn’t good enough for managers to work around HR people, systems or policies. Both parties have an important role to play to ensure HR strategies and the expertise of HR specialists is effectively applied to realise tangible benefits for the organisation.
While of course it matters that senior leaders support the mission and purpose of HR, the most important role rests with you and every member of your HR team. The credibility you earn and strength of partnership you are able to build determine the influence you will have on the performance of your business.
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